Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

Where just a few years earlier, Malthusians had demanded limits on energy consumption by claiming fossil fuels were scarce, now they demanded limits by claiming the atmosphere was scarce. “It’s not that we’re running out of stuff,” explained McKibben in 1998; “what we’re running out of are what the scientists call ‘sinks.’ Places to put the by-products of our large appetites. Not garbage dumps—we could go on using Pampers till the end of time and still have empty space left to toss them away. But the atmospheric equivalent of garbage dumps.”109

But in 2003, Sebastian Mallaby, a journalist from The Washington Post, discovered International Rivers had severely misrepresented the situation on the ground in Uganda, where the group was trying to stop a dam. An International Rivers staff person told Mallaby that the Ugandan people near the proposed dam opposed it. But when he asked her whom he could interview to verify her assertion, she became evasive and told him that he would get in trouble with the government if he asked questions. Mallaby did so anyway, hiring a local sociologist to translate. “For the next three hours, we interviewed villager after villager, and found the same story,” Mallaby wrote. “The dam people had come and promised generous financial terms, and the villagers were happy to accept them and relocate. . . . The only people who objected to the dam were the ones living just outside its perimeter. They were angry because the project was not going to affect them. They had been offered no generous payout, and they were jealous of their neighbors.”115 I found the same thing in my interviews. Not only were Congolese like Caleb enthusiastic about the Virunga Park dam, Rwandans I interviewed near hydroelectric dams were ecstatic at the prospects of getting electricity.

Whereas in January 2019, Thunberg had paid lip service to the need for poor nations to develop, in September she said, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”124 But economic growth was what lifted Suparti out of poverty, saved the whales, and is the hope for Bernadette, once Congo achieves security and peace. Economic growth is necessary for creating the infrastructure required for protecting people from natural disasters, climate-related or not. And economic growth created Sweden’s wealth, including that of Thunberg’s own family. It is fair to say that without economic growth, the person who is Greta Thunberg would not exist.

“National Geographic went too far with the caption,” said one of them, seeking to shift the blame. But the primary purpose of her expedition was to link dying polar bears to climate change. “Documenting [the effects of climate change] on wildlife hasn’t been easy,” she added.11 But the reason it wasn’t easy is that there was no evidence for polar bear famine.

It wasn’t the first time IPCC had exaggerated climate change’s impact in a Summary. In 2010, an IPCC Summary falsely claimed climate change would result in the melting of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. This was a serious case of alarmism given that 800 million people depend on the glaciers for irrigation and drinking water. Shortly after, four scientists published a letter in Science pointing out the error, with one of them calling it “extremely embarrassing and damaging,” adding, “These errors could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected.”

IPCC and other scientific organizations are most misleading in what their summaries and press releases don’t say, or at least not clearly. They don’t clearly say that the death toll from natural disasters has radically declined and should decline further with continued adaptation. They don’t clearly say that wood fuel build-up and constructing homes near forests matters more than climate change in determining the severity and impact of fires in much of the world. And they don’t clearly say that fertilizer, tractors, and irrigation matter more than climate change to crop yields.

As we have seen, the death toll and damage from extreme events have declined 90 percent during the last century, including in poor nations. For McKibben’s argument to be true, that long, salutary trend will need to reverse itself, and quickly.43

And, for McKibben’s claim to be true, climate change must prove to be a greater challenge than coping with the Black Death, which killed about half of all Europeans, about fifty million people; the control of infectious diseases, which killed hundreds of millions; the great wars of Europe and the Holocaust, which killed more than 100 million people; postwar independence movements and the spread of nuclear weapons; and Africa’s World Wars, which killed millions of people.

And climate change must prove to be greater than all other contemporary challenges, from the monumental task of lifting one billion souls out of extreme poverty in a world where manufacturing is playing a smaller role in economic development, to the battles and wars that ki...

Throughout this book we have seen environmental support for various behaviors, technologies, and policies motivated not by what the science tells us but by intuitive views of nature. These intuitive views rest on the appeal-to-nature fallacy. The appeal-to-nature fallacy holds that “natural” things, e.g., tortoiseshell, ivory, wild fish, organic fertilizer, wood fuel, and solar farms, are better for people and the environment than “artificial” things, e.g., plastics from fossil fuels, farmed fish, chemical fertilizer, and nuclear plants. It is fallacious for two reasons. First, the artificial things are as natural as the natural things. They are simply newer. Second, the older, “natural” things are “bad,” not good, if “good” is defined as protecting sea turtles, elephants, and wild fish. This background and largely unconscious idea of nature is, in my experience, very strong. I have seen many environmentalists dismiss evidence demonstrating, for example, the larger impact of renewable energy and organic farming on landscapes. “Natural” things must, by definition, be better for the environment.

The assumption was that nature, when left alone, achieves a kind of harmony or equilibrium. Like the thermostat switching on in the cold, nature gracefully, gradually self-regulates species and environments in and out of existence when it senses things are out of proportion. It’s an interwoven system that works as a whole unless humans interfere with its operations. But “nature” doesn’t operate like a self-regulating system. In reality, different natural environments change constantly. Species come and go. There is no whole or “system” to collapse. There’s just a changing mix of plants, animals, and other organisms over time. We might prefer one version of that mixture, like the Amazon rainforest, but there is nothing in the mixture telling us that it is better or worse than some other combination, like a farm or desert.48 The same is true for what we call “the climate.” The climate simply refers to the weather over a period of time, say thirty years, either in a particular place or the entire planet.

While scientists borrowed from cybernetics to describe nature as a self-regulating system, the notion of nature existing in a delicate balance is Neoplatonism, and ungrounded in empirical reality. “The commonplaces of modern ecology, such as ‘everything connects,’ ” writes environmental philosopher Mark Sagoff, “recalls the neoplatonic view of nature as an integrated mechanism into which every species fits.”49

Some ecological scientists recognized that they had inadvertently and unconsciously imposed a fundamentally religious idea onto science. “I am convinced that modern ecological theory, so important in our attitudes towards nature and man’s interference with it,” admitted one, “owes its origin to the [Judeo-Christian intelligent] design argument. The wisdom of the creator is self-evident. . . . no living thing is useless, and all are related one to the other.”50 The flip side of nature’s interconnectedness was collapse, which E.O. Wilson adopted as the core assumption of his apocalyptic species area model. What the scientists had re-created in both the species area model, and the prediction that extinctions would result in the extinction of humankind, were the first and last book of the Bible. Genesis tells the story of Eden, and humankind’s fall from it, as a consequence of its hubris. The book of Revelation tells the story of the end of the world, the ultimate consequence of humankind’s fall.

Environmentalism today is the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations. It provides a new story about our collective and individual purpose. It designates good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. And it does so in the language of science, which provides it with legitimacy.51 On the one hand, environmentalism and its sister religion, vegetarianism, appear to be a radical break from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. For starters, environmentalists themselves do not tend to be believers, or strong believers, in Judeo-Christianity. In particular, environmentalists reject the view that humans have, or should have, dominion, or control, over Earth.52 On the other hand, apocalyptic environmentalism is a kind of new Judeo-Christian religion, one that has replaced God with nature. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, human problems stem from our failure to adjust ourselves to God. In the apocalyptic environmental tradition, human problems stem from our failure to adjust ourselves to nature. In...

“Whether or not God exists (and as an atheist I personally doubt it),” noted psychologist Jonathan Haidt, “. . . religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people.”56 The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.

After World War II, many leading scholars and universities in Europe and the United States rejected the teaching of morality and virtue as unscientific and thus without value. “Reason reveals life to be without purpose or meaning,” was the intellectual consensus, a historian notes. “Science is the only legitimate exercise of the intellect, but that leads inevitably to technology and, ultimately, to the bomb.59 “From humanists we learned that science threatened civilization,” the historian added. “From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied there is no hope.” The result, he argued, was a “culture of despair.”60 Apocalyptic environmentalism emerged from this crisis of faith and, over the decades, became pronounced during moments of global change and crisis. In 1970, when fears of overpopulation were at their peak, Earth Day was held in the midst of national turmoil over the Vietnam War. In 1983, during heightened Cold War tensions, more than 300,000 people protested in London’s Hyde Park against nuclear weapons. And in the early 1990s, climate change emerged as the new apocalyptic threat at the end of the Cold War.

In the wake of the 2016 elections in Britain and the United States, where voters rejected, in one way or another, the established global order, climate alarmism grew more extreme.

Green utopianism is still there. Apocalyptic environmentalists in Europe and the United States advocate a Green New Deal not just to reduce carbon emissions but also to create good jobs with high pay, reduce economic inequality, and improve community life. But negativity has triumphed over positivity. In place of love, forgiveness, kindness, and the kingdom of heaven, today’s apocalyptic environmentalism offers fear, anger, and the narrow prospects of avoiding extinction.

To defend ourselves psychologically against this low-level fear we create what Becker calls an “immortality project,” a way of feeling that some part of us will live on after our deaths. Many people feel immortal by having children and grandchildren. Others feel immortal creating art, businesses, writing, or communities that will last after they are gone. We subconsciously cast ourselves as the heroes of our immortality projects. “It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero is magical, religious, and primitive, or secular, scientific, and civilized,” Becker wrote. “It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning.”63

For Becker, an exaggerated fear of death reveals a deep and often subconscious dissatisfaction with one’s life. What we really fear when we obsess over our death is that we aren’t making the most of our lives. We feel stuck in bad relationships, unsupportive communities, or oppressive careers. That was certainly the case for me. I was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago. I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate change reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the natural environment.

The late British philosopher Roger Scruton thought deeply about the politics of anger. On the one hand, he believed it was valuable and necessary. “Resentment is to the body politic what pain is to the body,” he wrote. “Bad to feel it, but good to be capable of feeling it, since without the ability to feel it we will not survive.”77 The problem, Scruton argued, is when “resentment loses the specificity of its target and becomes directed to society as a whole,” Scruton concludes. At that point resentment becomes “an existential posture” adopted not “to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. . . . That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.” Another word for what Scruton is describing is nihilism.78

Improving environmental journalism requires coming to grips with some fundamentals. Power density determines environmental impact. As such, coal is good when it replaces wood and bad when it replaces natural gas or nuclear. Natural gas is good when it replaces coal and bad when it replaces uranium. Only nuclear energy can power our high-energy human civilization while reducing humankind’s environmental footprint. Power-dense farming, including of fish, creates the prospect of shrinking humankind’s largest environmental impact.

What if we treated objects of mass destruction as memento mori? Experiments inspired by Ernest Becker’s work suggest that doing so could help with our angst. When psychologists encourage people to think of their eventual deaths, they tend to feel anxious about how they are living their lives. But when they encourage people to imagine they are dying, and to look back on their lives, they tend to do so with gratitude, appreciation, and greater love toward those around them.87

Saving nuclear has been two steps forward and one step back. California and New York are moving forward with plans to prematurely close Diablo Canyon and Indian Point nuclear plants, which provide reliable and low-cost carbon-free power to roughly six million people, thanks to the influence of groups like NRDC, EDF, Sierra Club, and 350.org. At the same time, a growing number of people appear to recognize the foolishness of doing so, and are changing their minds about the technology. In researching and writing this book I was pleased to find support for nuclear energy from unexpected quarters, including from people with whom I disagreed, at least on some questions. Christine Figgener, the German sea turtle scientist, who started a worldwide discussion on straws and plastics, told me she supports nuclear. “I think the world is not black and white,” she said. And Zion Lights of Extinction Rebellion told me she had changed her mind after a scientist friend told her it was safe. “I said, ‘That’s not what I’ve been told.’ And he said, ‘Don’t just listen to what people tell you.’ And so I looked it up and he was right. The data shows it is safe. And I realized solar panels and batteries are not going to meet demand.”

Some appear to be moderating their views of climate change, as well. In December 2019, David Wallace-Wells, the author of the apocalyptic 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth, which claimed climate change was “much, much worse than you think,” wrote that, “For once, the climate news might be better than you thought. It’s certainly better than I’ve thought.”2 Wallace-Wells pointed to research by Pielke and others showing that the IPCC’s high–coal use scenario, known by its technical name, RCP 8.5, was highly improbable, and temperatures were likely to peak at below 3 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

Environmental humanism will eventually triumph over apocalyptic environmentalism, I believe, because the vast majority of people in the world want both prosperity and nature, not nature without prosperity. They are just confused about how to achieve both.